So what was the worst game you ever had the dubious pleasure of playing?
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So what was the worst game you ever had the dubious pleasure of playing?
Probably Space Ace on the SNES.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GOWxtGaAOk
Bionic Granny on C64 is pretty bad, as is the European version of Street Fighter on C64 which is done by Tiertex.
Thankfully the Kixx re release of the game has the American version on the B side of the tape and it is really good.
I'd say the worst game I have ever played is Duke Nukem. This has to be the dumbest game that ever existed.
Do we need to narrow it down or just say "film licenses"...? I remember James Bond games being consistently some of the worst. Back in the 8 and 16 bit days 99% of all film licenses were bloody awful games. Off the top of my head the only fun ones I can remember where Ghostbusters (C64) and the first Batman movie game.
Also:
Almost everything US Gold made (ever).
The only half decent game Tiertex made in that era was Strider 2.
I always hated Battle Arena Toshinden - it was like playing Tekken at 1/4 speed while someone poked your eyes with a pencil.
I've played some terrible games over the years (own lots of bad games on SNES) but honestly the only game that is jumping into my head at the moment is Resident Evil 6 :P
Only one off the top of my head (when I was younger) Bubsy 3D :D
It was like the developers went "I can create colourful polygons!" and then published it.
I can't stand the games where the combat isn't real time. Taking turns drives me crazy!!! I just don't have the patience. Just picked up Shadowrun returns in the steam sale and can't stand it. Dont' get me wrong. I would like to like it but I just can't. On the plus side, I picked up Trine and it's awesome!
James pond. What a load of nonsense that was.
Ocean did quite a few decent movie tie ins on 8 & 16 bit platforms.
Platoon (One of the best movie tie in games ever, great on all systems)
Untouchables (C64 version is stupidly tough from level 1, prefer Amstrad & Atari ST versions)
Robocop Trilogy
Batman the Movie (Excellent movie tie in on both 8 & 16 bit platforms, they also did the excellent Caped Crusader based on the comics)
Total Recall
Adams Family (good but VERY hard)
Cobra (Spectrum version good, Amstrad & C64 versions are bad)
Darkman (Not bad, not the best though)
Highlander (Really bad but it was an early game)
Hook (Not to bad platformer, a bit rushed though, late in 8 bit platforms life - 1992)
Night Rider (TV program - This is just a BAD game all round)
Miami Vice (TV Program, not to bad a game)
Neverending Story (Early text based adventure with graphics on top of screen for each section)
Night Breed (Average movie tie in that was more a beat em up than action adventure type thing, best on 16 bit)
Rambo 2 (Decent Commando style clone, early game)
Rambo 3 (Has its flaws but must admit not as bad as the reviews said)
Red Heat (Average beat em up, not to clever in all honesty, very repetitive)
Terminator 2 (Decent game with varied scenes for each level)
Top Gun (Early flight sim based on movie)
V (TV Program, decent action adventure game, hard to get into but good)
Run the Gauntlet (TV Program, multi event type sports game with mainly top down racing sections, pretty good)
Activision did get in on the whole movie tie ins also but their main forte was arcade conversions like Power Drift, Wonderboy in Monster Land, Ninja Spirit, Dynamite Dux and loads more. Gone are the days though when Activision did stuff like this. They were behind Ghostbusters 1 & 2, first game is pretty good, second one takes 3 scenes from the movie and made an average game out of it, could have done a lot more with it really.
US Gold did the Action Game for Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, average to good reviews, its not outstanding but personally enjoy firing it up on C64 or Atari ST and play through it. Lucasarts did the excellent adventure game using the same engine as Monkey Island etc.
But back to bad games.....
Big Trouble in Little China (8 bit platforms) has to be one of the worst games ever made based on the excellent movie, Activision churned out a stinker with this one. Looks and plays bad for a start, but the gameplay takes it to new levels of awful. You have 3 characters in a row and you control the one at the front. It just continuously scrolls to the left and every so often an enemy comes onto the screen you have to beat up, when the character you are controlling gets low on energy you switch to the next and it just keeps going, that's all it does, its REALLY bad!
Aliens, Ferral, you missed out Aliens (C64)
The scary bit where the alien bears down on the screen, with the tracker alert blaring still colours my experience of scary modern FPSs. The most terrifying part of FEAR, for example, was any of the bits with the invisible assassins charging at you as you desperately try to shoot them in the face. Brought back long forgotten fears...
I don't have anything to add to bad games. I've pretty much always done my research before buying.
There was actually 2 versions of Aliens, Euro and USA
The Euro one (think its Euro - Electric Dreams) was the first person type game where you had to work through the complex
The USA version (again, may have them mixed up, this is the Activision one but released through Electric Dreams in the UK, cover of budget re release does say US version on the front) is multi level, starting with flying through rings down to the planet surface in 1st person, then onto a angled top down maze bit rescuing Newt and killing Aliens etc and then the fight with the queen in the power loader.
Sounds interesting. I might check out the US version next time I have a retro gaming itch.
ps. I never really got very far with Aliens because (A) it was too scary, and (B) I had the budget cassette case version which didn't come with a map, and I never quite figured out how the rooms were all linked (I was only about 9)
The worst game for me is WolfQuest. My girlfriend thought we should play this together and become wolves to "explore the wilderness, hunt elk, and encounter stranger wolves in a quest to find a mate. In the newly released second episode, Slough Creek, players find a den, establish a territory, raise pups and defend them from predators such as coyotes and grizzly bears."
It sounded pretty interesting, so we registered and that took them about 10 days to process because someone had to personally authorise the registrations, unlike automated bots which most systems use. "It must be a really special game then," I joked to my girlfriend. Then when we both finally got to play it, we uninstalled it after 15 minutes.
Probably a series of unfortunate events. Which I played on the GameCube. That really was terrible. IMO most games from films are.
I just checked out wolfquest on YouTube.
It looks terrible.
Well, I have trouble bringing all the games I've played to mind, so I might be missing a dodo or six, but the one that comes to mind immediately was 7th Guest.
It was a problem-solving type game, wandering around a haunted house or something, and the novelty was that it was sort-of fully cinematic, with pre-rendered graphics.
What there was wasn't, I suppose, that bad. The truly lousy thing was that it was so short. I got it home about 2pm, installed it, played it and finished that same day. I didn't even play non-stop. Total playing time, to completion, about 6 hours. Not my idea of value for my £40, about 20 years ago.
Anyone remember Technocop on the Megadrive? That was pretty rubbish.
Technocop was one of the original video games that stirred up the fuss before Mortal Kombat landed.
You have an option to net the bad guys or just shoot them, if (no real if about it) you just shoot them they explode in a shower of blood and leave a puddle of blood on the floor with a carcass sitting in it, you could even shoot the civilians on it if they got in the way. The reviews for it back in the day on C64 & Amiga all mentioned the violence and gore and how it was OTT.
I have it now on Amiga, C64 & Megadrive (All originals), I grabbed the Megadrive version back in the day half expecting it to get banned and pulled from the shelves. The game itself isn't to great like you say, drive a few minutes on a virtually straight road, shooting enemy cars that don't seem to be affected by your bullets, then you pull over and work through a building shooting the bad guys, you get a tight time limit also to take out a specific person, then stroll back to the start of the level and another driving section. Each level looks virtually the same as the last with backdrop and enemies.
Potentially it could have been a great game if a bit more work was put into it, unfortunately it fell flat.
Another thing with the C64 version and it being on tape was that you actually spent more time loading than actually playing the game!
My worst game has to be Homefront. Nearly everything about it was frustrating. Short Campaign, bugs. controls & i usually don't really hate on a games graphics
but Homefront graphics was just terrible, when i saw the blood texture it just looked like a ugly pixelated tomato Ketchup. I just can't believe they shipped the game broken on Day 1.
That will teach me to pre-order things.
I actually swapped it for Olympic Gold with a friend of mine. The problem with Technocop was that, like you say, every level looked and felt the same. It got monotonous after 5 mins, although I did enjoy the 'Technocop - Busted' bit.
Super Kick Off on the game boy has to be up there, right load of rubbish. And I wasted a Christmas present on it.
+1 for JP, although if you didn't play it on Amiga, you haven't really played it!
Robocod was brilliant, been playing it through on UAE on my HTPC and massive TV :)
Krusty's Super Fun House and Marios Time Machine for the SNES.
Don't think "worst" is the correct word, disappointing & frustrating probably more accurate, Twilight 2000 on pc (dos 1991), this is nothing to do with the twilight books/flims, it's a crpg based on the old pen&paper rpg, cold war influenced Post WW3 setting.
It had a lot of potential and the previews/developer interviews I'd read in the magazines at the time, however it was a big disappointment.
To start with they closely followed the original twilight 2000 rule set for making characters, this means a lot of randomness is involved, stats are randomly rolled, skills are interesting, you have a carer path, each one counts as 4 years, you pick the carer and it give you a fixed set of skills unless you've already done that carer before then you get to pick a number of skills from a list for that carer, then you can pick an additional skill from a general list.
The problem is it's full implementation, this means a random 1-10 for each path, if equal or lower than the total carers then war breaks out, you get one additional carer in a military path and that's it, so you can start get one skill pick and then that's it, alternatively you could get 10 picks, it's all random.
now you might think you want 10 picks but you don't as each one adds 4 years to your age and age has stat effects, so you can end up too old and have your stats crippled.
finally you get an initiative score, this is 1-6/2 if your last carer was civilian or education or 1-6 if it was Army or Marines, you also get a +1 if you've taken certain at any point eg special forces
the way the game initiative system works in combat (turn based) is each turn has 6 phases, it counts down from 6 and you get actions in your phase and each subsequent phase, so if you have initiative 6 you'll go first and have 6 actions per turn, if you have initiative 1 you get 1 action per turn and go last (well you will get your action before eveyone else on phase1 but they will of had multiple actions in 5 other phases before you, then they'll get another after you)
Basically if you get anything below 3, just scrap the character and reroll them from scratch and ideally you're looking for 5+
This means that even if you get good random stats, don't get randomly gimped skills (too few carers or too many) you can still get gimped on the final random roll.
To top this all off, your team is made up of 20 characters so you can spend hours just trying to build up a team.
Although there are some good points, while there is a massive list of carer paths there's not much more than about 10 that are useful because While the game has every skill the original rpg used the majority are not actually used by the game so can be ignored, there's also a pre-made team and you'll probably never use more than 8-10 of them.
One thing to note is languages, the game has 50 of them but only uses 30ish but you will need every one, doesn't have to be high rank just a couple of points.
So character generation is very detailed but frustrating.
Now we get to the game, it's a mix of early 3d for vehicles, 2d isometric for foot work (much like the original fallout) and some map and management screens.
The game map is massive, it's the whole of northern Poland, so about 120miles x 300miles, so trying to go anywhere except by fast travel is often pointless (although there is a bug you can exploit by manually driving on the edge of a road in the 3d mode that will double your speed)
And time is a factor as things take in game time travelling, healing, repairing and you do have time limits on missions and enemy actions.
Isometic combat, is fine bar one major issue, range, each tile is 1m and guns are accurately done, ie an assault rifle is around 50m short, 100m medium, 200m long and 400m extreme range, now granted due to the game mechanics anything over long range is bad and long itself is unlikely even at high skill+stat ranks, but the view screen is only 7 tiles by 9 tiles, so even short range could be up to 8 screens away.
http://www.myabandonware.com/media/c...ht-2000_23.gif
3d combat, this is in many ways worse, it's very basic, while I don't mind that so much it's also got a crippling view range, much like the isometric game play, weapon ranges greatly outstrip the actual view range, so it'll alert you to an enemy the range and direction, but you cannot see them and they can happily shoot at you. There are two options here, go to the "cinematic" auto combat, where your charactures will drive and shoot based off their skills as the enemy does likewise or try your luck controlling the wire guided missile if you use a bradley apc, while the ai shoots at you.
Although I generally found myself using a 3rd option, getting out and just wasting the enemy tank with a TOW2 or AT5 in isometric combat, where they can only use their heavy machine gun which you massively out range, this saves on vehicle repair and eliminates the chance of your tank and squad getting killed in the automatic 3d combat, where the enemy does fairly well in.
http://www.abandonia.com/files/games...-%202000_1.png
This is where the disappointment starts
Finally is the missions, this is in many ways the big let down, you fight vs the ai over control of the many villages on the map through missions, you will do one of about 5 different missions pre day for a netural town to gain control of it, the a will also take over netural towns and attack towns you control and you have to do a mission (2 types) to hold onto it.
And this is where the disappointment and potential frustration really kicks in.
The missions are from what I can remember, bring supplies, find the spy, kill the bandits, heal the sick and recover the vehicle, the last will not get you allied with the town but will get you an additional tank/vehicle to add to your stock of things you never use.
The attack missions are basically kill the bandits or destroy the enemy tank/s
I think there is a final mission, kill the baron, which you can only do once you've got control of every village, if you try before that you just die/game over.
What's disappointing is the very limited missions and bland sameness off them and every village, back in the preview interviews they said they would have much more to this game and had screen shots of places which never appeared in the game.
Granted I never did finish it, the reason for this is the stupid language system, to get/complete your missions you have to talk to the village elder/major and each village has a randomly picked language and only one, so if they only speak scots-gaelic (and yes that can happen, even though you're in poland) and you don't have anyone with a point in scots-gaelic then you're screwed, quit the game its all you can do, next time make sure you've got every language you need.
On top of all these flawed mechanics, you got some rather bad and clunky menu system.
A promising game that sucked up hours of time in my youth until I realised how flawed it was and never went back to it.
Actually I see all the games listed prior and top them all by THE WORST arcade conversion ever to come out on C64 (Amiga etc was just as bad). This game was so bad on the C64 and other 8 bit machines they dropped the original twin jewel case release and put it onto a compilation, it did surface on budget re release after the compilation.
This is even worse than Big Trouble in Little China which is scraping the bottom of the barrel!
Folks I give you Hard Drivin
http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http...hp%3FID%3D1145
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntEz4o5eq7k
Granted the C64 isn't the best with 3D graphics but this looks like a Spectrum puked it out, dog eats it and digests it for a few weeks and then poops it out and then they serve it up cold and rotting!
Amiga version (considerably better) :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ell23e81szI
Arcade original :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZA7iv2DLKs
The C64 could do decent racing games, looking at Turbo Outrun and Europa and the amazingly fast superb conversion of Power Drift from Activision (go check them out on C64 on Youtube to see what I mean), Hard Drivin on C64 should have been buried with E.T in the desert but never to be exhumed.
Sorderon's Shadow.
After the amazing Lords Of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge, this was released some time later by Beyond as some link to the world that had been created by the late great Mike Singleton. It was so obtuse that I didn't have a clue what I was doing, where I was meant to go or why.
Maybe there was a great game in there but I never found it. Perhaps the disappointment is why I remember it as the 'worst' for me.
Not many come to mind, but CoD:MW3 was pretty awful. Looking back, I have no idea why I bought it; it was fun for about a week, and then it turned horribly boring.
I borrowed the first Modern Warfare shortly after it came out and only got around halfway through the campaign and tuned out, was shortly after the nuclear blast, tried Ghosts & Black Ops also and just don't like them at all, last decent CoD game I played I thought was World at War and everything prior.
I don't see why the MoH reboot and sequel got so much stick either, both decent games which I enjoyed a lot more than the MW games
Recently - Watchdogs.
Couldn't play for more than 30mins before I was bored.
Back to Batman and BF4 for me.
Most of the recent Serious Sam or Duke Nukem games I played were terrible. I also remember some Area 51 game I wasn't too impressed with. AVP was rubbish as well.
Oh and VietCong - Purple Haze for the xbox was absolutely dire. As for some of the Modern Warfare games they did have their moments early on but it wore off quick. I'm really hoping for more great single player games as I really can't be bothered with the grind on multiplayer games anymore - so bored of it.
Its weird, I'm struggling to remember the bad ones from back in the 80's and early 90's, I must've blocked them out cos I know there were plenty of stinkers!
It's a tossup between Deus Ex Invisible War (because that was *such* a let down from the first one, and so very, very buggy) or XIII. Fixed save points. In a PC game. Whoever thought that was a good idea should be flayed alive.
Duke Nukem forever.. oh God... what was this supposed to be ?
No storyline whatsoever, nothing made sense, was it meant to be Duke Nukem for kids ?
No violence, no babes. :(
Damn that's a hard one, I've played a lot of crap games.
Probably Leisure Suit Larry, that's some crap right there.
the sims. why does everyone love it so.
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (Ubisoft 2003)
Zero re-playability. No challenge or limitations on hints that I can recall.
Only game I ever bought on impulse... because it was a tv tie-in. Never again. At least until Steam, but by then, information abound.
Incidentally, anyone interested in a 10+ year old Crime Solving game, only used once, perfect condition? (joking)
Lair on the PS3. Utter garbage, even after they patched in proper controls.
Really Big Sky. Indie game I got free on Steam. Rubbish.
Either Sim City or Watch Dogs for me, in recent memory.
I'm pretty sure it's next to impossible to make a stable city with the crappy build size they give you. Surely can't be that hard to patch? Also boring as hell after you've done a few cities.
Watch Dogs, most hyped up crap game I've ever played, I've never looked forward to a game so much to be let down like I was. Graphics are crud, storyline is generic and boring, the car driving mechanic was just AWFUL.
I hated it so much I couldn't even be bothered to try out the GFX mod.
Colonial Marines
The worst game that I personally ever played has to be Drakengard 3. It has some of the worst frame rate issues and a combat system so dull that I struggled to stay awake. It's really a shame because the the story and characters are quite amazing.
Infestation:survivor stories
Horrible game, with more bugs than the amazon rainforest
The one that stands out from recent memory is Walking Dead: Survival Instinct. It should never have been released in the state it was
Merit's Galactic Reunion. Was so crappy that I couldn't even start playing it. Don't want to remeber about it.
Every Pokemon
game on the ds apart from heart gold and soul silver.
Boring and too many new Pokemon
Duke Nukem Forever
Blade 2 on the PS2.
I have a faint memory of managing about 10 minutes on it only to never play it again.
Try as I might, I cannot remember why
One of the worst games I have played is Mafia II. So linear and so very very boring. Even though I got it free, I still want my bandwidth back.
Lone survivor On psv
Final Fantasy 7.
I was at uni and was a nintendo fan so the playstation was the enemy.
It looked a good game graphically (for the time) But the fact that battles just started without any prior warning annoyed me. Since then I've realised that this is a staple of jrpgs which just seems stupid to me
Bubsy 3D on the Playstation. It was nothing like the amazing SNES games! It made me want to rinse my eyes in bleach repeatedly.
Prince of Persia on SNES
Sins of a solar empire rebellion. Not because I didnt enjoy playing, but because framerates drop to nothing when u start building bigger fleets, and its not a problem with my GPU either. heard its they way the game was built. Makes the whole game a bit pointless.
Best
AJ
Narc Amiga - bought on the basis of what turned out to be an obviously a compensated magazine review.
equal with EA Cricket ???? PC - the same year Electronics Boutique stopped their PC game return policy - had to bin it rather than let anyone else go through the same.
Sword of the stars 2 on release. Worst release i've seen in a long time, sadly i was stupid enough to get hyped up by it and had it pre-ordered. One year later the game finally has had its last few bugfixes and made it playable... by then the price dropped by 75%. I learned my lesson since then and haven't pre-ordered any game since.
Dragon Age 2. What the hell was that crap. A wave system where enemies literally drop from the ****ing sky over and over again, so there is no way to tactically manage your cooldowns because you have no idea how many enemies there will be. No tactical overhead view made the combat even more of a complete cluster****. Not to mention the repeated use of environments, it felt like every quest was in warehouse A, warehouse B, Cave A, or Cave B. In the end I turned it down to easy just so I could finish the story and even that was ****ing terrible.
Watchdogs! what a waste of money.
Clive barkers Jericho on PC. Terrible gunplay and idiotic AI.
Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness. Flipping awful compared to the first few. Although they did quite well with the latest one.
Going to be controversial but Red Dead Redemption. Gave up after about an hour. Probably not fair but just found the whole thing to be pointless
My first ever gaming experience was a ge called Granny's Garden and it was dull dull dull.
Jet set Willy.
If you don't know why, you didn't play enough of it.
This is gonna sound like me being fussy but Deus Ex: Invisible War. I picked it up on steam sale really cheap since I figured it cant be bad enough to not be worthwhile for <£1 even if just for the story. As it happens I've currently lost all will to attempt to play it because the game frequently requires full reloads when entering a new area and each individual area is tiny.
Shouldnt really have expected much of a very dated console port I guess, just expected a little more since the original still runs well on PC, partly due to help of 3rd party fixes and partly just because it was well made for PC.
Would that be the original release that needed the poke so you could actually complete it, or just the fact that it is hard as nails and requires the dexterity of a Russian gymnast just to get past the first few screens without losing all your lives!!!
Manic Miner can be just as bad, same goes for JSW2 as it is the same game as the first one but they added an extra 40 or so screens, definitely one for masochists!!!
There is also Technician Ted (The Chip Factory) by Hewson, another one where the 128k version had even more screens making it even harder to get through!
Then there was the Monty Mole games, thankfully not quite as hard as JSW, Manic Miner & Tech Ted and they were manageable but still tough, especially Monty on the Run where if you selected the wrong items at the beginning it made things even harder, especially if you didn't select the passport!!
Duke Nukem forever. Took 10 years to develop and this is what they end up with?
Well my grandson (12 years old) thought south park was rubbish and racist :lol:
Whatttt? No one has said ET on the Atari 2600! That's the normal response.
Bad Rats. Worst steam gift ever.
Not necessarily the worst, but the most disappointing game I've played in a long time is Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, it has nothing on Civilization V
I bought Romance of three Kingdoms for Super Nes. It was pretty shocking.
Some nayan cat ripoff called space cat or something on the xb360 sooo bad
Rockstar Table Tennis for X360, do I need to say any more?
Definitely have to be bad rats.
Assassins Creed 3 was awful! Terrible story, janky gameplay and just felt unfinished.
Desert Bus.
Watchdogs, i tried so hard to play it, got like 7 hours in, couldn't do it
any game on Amiga that crashed after putting in the last disk before the game started.
ET for the Atari 2600 was pretty dire.
I can see why so many ended up in landfill to be fair... Now Enduro Racer - that was AWESOME!! :P
A stroll in the bleak forest was so terrible it's hilarious! Only played it recently and so as a ZX Spectrum title, it was more suited to its time. A bear that shoots bubbles with the most bizarre control scheme, fantastic!
Thief, it was so dark even at high brightness you couldnt see anything!
Beestmeel insane just listening to the music lol
The Walking dead survival instincts.
Game wise - Counter Strike and Heroes 6
Community wise - Dota 2 and World of Warcraft are kinda on the throne
Pokemon on the N64. It just ruined the whole gameboy experience for me!
I actually laughed HARD at that :)